


Nothing but Human

by captainpeggy



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/F, Minor Maria Hill/Natasha Romanov, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-23
Updated: 2016-03-23
Packaged: 2018-05-28 14:07:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,835
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6332182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/captainpeggy/pseuds/captainpeggy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>Every fight tells a story: strikes strung out to form sentences; kicks and punches taking on the role of punctuation. Natasha had never thought you could see hers in the way she moved. She’d never thought anyone would have bothered to look. </em>
</p>
<p>inspired by <a href="http://borkyno.tumblr.com/post/140866119872/headcanon-that-natasha-trained-sharon-and-their">this</a> post</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nothing but Human

The girl was good.

Not just good. She was excellent, and that wasn’t a word Natasha Romanoff tossed around casually: Carter might not have been trained since birth, but somehow that gave her even more of an edge. She’d learned to fight after she learned to live. She had something to fight _for--_ something deep and integral.

The Red Room had thought that trying to take Natasha’s humanity away would make her efficient. And it had. Oh, it had, but sometimes in those training sessions with Sharon, sometimes when they locked eyes and Natasha saw a fire behind them unlike the shadow she saw in the mirror-- sometimes she wondered whether it had made her effective.

The two of them didn’t talk: SHIELD hadn’t asked Natasha to be a peer counselor. They’d asked her to punch, and punch hard, so that was what she did, but after decades of working in intelligence, she couldn’t spend time around people without compiling a file in her head. Sharon tied her hair back in a ponytail, not a bun, and she didn’t dress for a fight-- jeans, blouses-- mostly, the recruits turned up in shorts, tank tops, and Natasha would roll her eyes and ask if they expected to go undercover in sweats.

Her face was smooth, unlined, and yet her voice had the timbre of an adult: that was how Natasha learned that Sharon was in her twenties, and the brown she let grow in at the roots of her dyed-blonde hair gave away that she was single, and the unevenly worn treads of her sneakers said that they were secondhand and _god,_ the things _that_ said, because _secondhand_ was better than a complete character profile if you looked at it the right way.

She hit smart, but still hard, and that was rarer than you might think-- Natasha could deflect clever jabs and dodge strong ones, but Sharon’s connected, and after Nat got over her surprise, after some aching ribs and jammed joints, she learned to watch Sharon’s hips instead of her shoulders to anticipate the attacks. And then it shifted again and Natasha was back to the expert, but things were different now, and she went into it with more respect.

By the end of the first month, they were both leaving with bruises.

That was how it went. Early, five AM, they would meet up, and they wouldn’t speak a goddamn word beyond ‘ready?’ and a cursory reply of ‘yes,’ and then Natasha would throw the first punch and neither of them thought of anything but the next step, next swing for hours.

She went to Maria after two months. “She’s ready. You know she is.”

Hill contemplated her computer screen in a way that made it clear she wasn’t really seeing it. “Are _you_?”

“Mari, don’t be ridiculous.”

“She’s good for you.” Hill narrowed her eyes at the machine, fiddling with the keyboard. “You’re good for her.”

“I was good for you too, once,” Nat said, voice flat.

“Yes,” said Maria matter-of-factly. “You were. And I was good for you. Once.”

“You’re not good for anyone.”

There was a pause, a long one.

Maria sighed. “I know.”

“It hurts, Hill. It hurts. My shoulders are burning and my shins are more blue than anything else and my legs cramp every time I stand.” The words were simple, a statement. “She’s ready.”

In the blue light of the monitor, Maria’s smile was melancholy. “She _is_ good for you.”

Natasha looked away.

The next day dawned cold, cloudy, and Sharon swung first this time, and Natasha’s eyes stayed on her hips a fraction of a second longer than they needed to. 

The day after that, they were both early, and the first hit was landed at 4:56, and as she winced, pulled her arms back up to shield her face, Sharon spoke. “You fight like a dancer.”

Natasha tilted her head just slightly, waiting.

“It won’t work on someone better than you.”

The words echoed oddly through the gym, muffled by the mats, rebounding off the brick.

“Do you think you’re better than me, Carter?” asked Nat softly, edging forwards a fraction of an inch.

It was Sharon’s turn to stand in silence for a moment, eyes calm and calculating.

And there was the strike, a knee sharply up to the kidneys with a grunt, but Natasha was fast, and her boots squeaked on the floor as she dodged-- one step, two, then she wheeled on Sharon, ducked, and there was a crack as forearm met ribcage hard enough to bruise.

Nat’s hair swung out behind her as she rolled back to her feet and spun back, but Sharon was ready and knocked the hit aside easily, bringing a foot up to Natasha’s chest and pushing her back across the mats. 

A short, sharp breath. Off-balance.

Sharon looked calm, almost relaxed, as Nat got her feet back under her and met her eyes blankly.

_You fight like a dancer._

And that was how Natasha learned that Sharon Carter was compiling intel on her as much as the other way around.

Every fight tells a story: strikes strung out to form sentences; kicks and punches taking on the role of punctuation. Natasha had never thought you could see hers in the way she moved. She’d never thought anyone would have bothered to look, and it took her aback as much as the kick had.

As the days wore on, she dropped every pretense of a file, of a recording on the woman-- forgot the secondhand sneakers. Forgot the ponytail. Forgot everything but the way Sharon moved, the jabs, the steps. No analysis. Just motion.

It was a strange way to get to know someone. Without thinking.

It felt good.

Natasha lost herself in the fights.

She lost herself in the deceptive quiet of the gym, in the early morning darkness, in the sting of a solid hit in her knuckles. She lost herself in the jagged hitch of Sharon’s exhalations and her own heart pounding out a bass line; the throb of adrenaline in her fingertips; the smell of sweat and the metallic tang of blood in her mouth from a bitten lip. She gave herself away, bit by bit, blow by blow, bruise by bruise.

She danced.

God, she danced.

The both of them, they danced, and that was it, really-- an elaborately choreographed, entirely improvised ballet that ended not with applause but with bloody scrapes, with pain, with bruises colouring flesh. With anticipation of the next day. The motions weren’t new, but the partner was.

If nothing else, she was new.

Three months in, and Sharon touched Natasha’s shoulder gently before she could leave, turned her so they were face-to-face, and then, impossibly, strangely, reached out to touch a scratch along her cheekbone.

“Was that me?”

Natasha’s diaphragm contracted, lungs filled, deflated, but no words.

Sharon ran a finger along the cut in silence, and the tingle of a soft electric current followed its path. “Look at that. The famous Black Widow.”

Blood pulsed out a rhythm as their eyes locked, brown and green, and Natasha’s lips parted ever so slightly as if to speak, but then Sharon was gone; the door slammed shut, and if it weren’t for the unfamiliar feeling deep in Nat’s gut, if it weren’t for the ache of overworked muscles and the sweat in her hair, she might have sworn the woman had never been there at all.

The day after that dawned brisk, but not in a frigid way: it was crisp, with the scent of hope tinging the air. Natasha grabbed Sharon’s wrist to deflect a hit as she had a million times before-- but this time Sharon didn’t pull away, and the two of them froze for a moment that could have been seconds, minutes, hours, days.

The day after that, their eyes lingered just a second too long on each other before Natasha threw a sharp cross to Sharon’s shoulder and dropped to the floor, ducking a jab, telling herself that it was good to look your opponent in the face, see them as a person... They had wanted her to dehumanize, to other, but Sharon was nothing _but_ human-- and God, how could she ever forget that--

It was in every one of her strikes, every one of her kicks; the woman’s fierce humanity shone through in the way she moved. It radiated from her, and it made her beautiful, impossible to look away from.

And later that week, when Sharon managed to back Natasha into a corner, when the only place to go was up against the wall, when Sharon’s grip on her wrist and shoulder seemed inescapable and she didn’t know whether she’d break free if she could-- Natasha closed her eyes. She felt the impact of the cold brick as Sharon shoved her into it, felt the brief jolt of pain up her spine, and she wondered that the woman’s touch didn’t burn.

Sharon’s breath was hot against her face, and her fingers loosened but her hands didn’t move, keeping Natasha pressed against the brick.

“I win.”

_“Fuck,_ ” growled Natasha, wrestling her wrist out of Sharon’s grip, feeling her heart pound, listening to the blood roar in her ears-- and Sharon still didn’t move, a faint smile curling across her face as the other hand still held Natasha prisoner, albeit weakly now--

“Fuck,” Natasha moaned again, and instead of breaking out, she threaded her free hand roughly around Sharon’s neck and pulled her closer, inhaling the smell of her shampoo, her laundry detergent, of _her._

Sharon’s hand slid off Nat’s shoulder to rest at her hips, fingers curling around the black fabric of her tank top, pulling creases into the knit as Natasha tangled her other hand into the loose strands of Sharon’s hair. Rushed, desperate, their lips met: breathing sped up, synchronized in quick gasps of air. They split apart for a brief second as Natasha straightened up, standing on her own feet away from the wall, but then Sharon’s palm was on her chest-- “ _Don’t”--_ shoving her back, and she let it, and she loved it.

There was no space between them now, touching, entangled, trapped in the sound of each other’s heartbeats as they moved: Nat’s hands were on Sharon’s hips now, just below her waist, rising and falling with each short breath as they kissed.

Sharon grabbed Nat’s shoulder, backed off half an inch, close enough that Natasha could almost still taste her breath, close enough that she could make out every individual strand of hair that had tumbled from Sharon’s ponytail. Close enough that she wanted nothing more than to run her fingers through it again, pull loose a few more, let a curtain of gold tumble around her face.

“Natasha,” whispered Sharon, and the careful enunciation of every syllable brushed against Nat’s lips, and she would have been satisfied if that had been the last word she ever heard--

“You kiss like a dancer.”

**Author's Note:**

> wow i'm really gay
> 
> anyways a thing rec as always-- the webcomic check, please is my new fave and you can read it in its entirety [here](http://omgeverythingplease.tumblr.com/tagged/comics-and-extras/chrono) for exactly $0.00. the price is right.
> 
> thanks again for reading!


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